Welcome back to 10 Powerful One-Liners to Keep Your
Writing Strong (Part Two). Here are five more powerful one-liners to
inspire you and keep your writing strong.

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.— Carol Burnett

It's unsettling to find your carefully crafted work
misquoted, misinterpreted, or taken out of context, but it happens all
the time, and I'm not talking about plagiarism or copyright
infringement. I'm talking about reading.

Readers filter your words through their
own history, bias, education, interests, objectives and mood, and what
they experience and retain may be quite different than what you intend.

Therefore, be absolutely sure of what you write.
Check your facts. Check them from a second source and then from a third.
Then check your sources. You alone are responsible for the validity of
your writing. If you have any doubt, leave it out.

Don't write anything you'll be tempted to
deny later. If you write when you're angry, edit after you've cooled
down. Denials and apologies may fulfill professional obligation, but
they can permanently scar your readers and your reputation.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.— George Orwell

If you don't believe what you're writing, change your belief or
change your writing. It's a brilliantly simple way to become a better
writer.

Hunt for verbal camouflage. Look for
crowded, circuitous passages in your writing. Notice redundancies and
superfluous adjectives. They signal a lack of conviction that is obvious
to your readers if not to you.

This can be a bit trickier for freelance
writers who are paid to represent someone else's ideas, but whether or
not you share your client's beliefs, you need to believe in your
writing. Never sell out.

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries. — A.A. Milne

(If you're naturally disorderly, hopscotch over this section and
meander your way to Nido Qubein's one-liner further down the page.)

To write vibrantly you must open yourself to
continual discovery. This is the thing about writing that sustains some
of us and catapults others towards the nearest freelance writer. If you
have the will to dabble in disorder, but you don't know the way...

Write about something you think you know nothing
about. You will discover that you do know something about it. You know
how to write.

Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all your energies on a limited set of targets. — Nido Qubein

This is perhaps the most difficult one-liner for new and wanna-be
writers. The desire to get paid for writing - and officially call
oneself a writer - is so strong that most new writers will accept
anything that remotely resembles a writing assignment - church
bulletins, classified ads, a child's birthday party invitations. They
end up spending so much time writing for nearly nothing that they don't
have any time left to research higher paying assignments.

Resist this temptation. Your writing and your
business will be stronger if you narrow your field to a few key areas of
interest. It may take longer to build a sizeable client list, but you
will develop a portfolio and a referral base that fit your business
goals.

The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. William Zinsser

There is nothing more to say.

Subscribe to receive my monthly Onwords™ column, and join me next month for tips on building a market-savvy writing portfolio.